ChÃ¡vez got the commitment from Uruguay to support and actively manage
Venezuela’s entry into Mercosur*, while the Frente Amplio (FA) ["broad
front"] government got some investments, energy cooperation agreements
(the real level of implementation of these agreements remains to be
seen) and some help from Venezuela in providing healthcare. But,
especially on the political level, the visit meant the Uruguayan
government could show the support it gets from the Venezuelan
government, which permits the Uruguayan government to conceal and make
up the right-wing policy that it has carried out since taking power.

At the same time, struggles that are going beyond the leaderships’
policy of conciliation and negotiation can be seen in some sectors, as
in the conflict at the biggest health insurance provider in Uruguay,
where its workers promoted and carried out measures of struggle in
defense of their wages, measures the leaders were unable to control.

Simultaneously, members of a housing cooperative society are
discussing a plan of struggle that includes a campaign of occupying
lands for the building of housing and for agricultural production,
while high school students are organizing and fighting for the right
to join a union.

Meanwhile, the pro-government bureaucracy that runs the trade union
federation (PIT-CNT) proposed a partial strike that it had announced
for Thursday, August 9, against the new tax, postponing it until the
end of the month, thereby rejecting a real plan for struggle against
this economic policy.

In this context, the presence of the Venezuelan President was
applauded and greeted enthusiastically by sectors of the "radical"
left. Sadly, these sectors support the politics of ChÃ¡vez, consistent
with keeping an anti-imperialist rhetoric for "21st century
socialism," (even though the rhetoric is more and more diluted), while
ChÃ¡vez guarantees the continuity of the big deals that multinational
corporations like Repsol, PetrobrÃ¡s or Techint, Botnia or Ense are
making, at the cost of hunger for our peoples and the plunder of our
resources. ChÃ¡vez’ insistence on entering a Mercosur custom-made for
the big national and foreign capitals, is one more sign of the true
character of his fervor for Latin America. This is how the "radical"
left refuses to raise a politics of class independence [workers’
independence from the bourgeoisie] with a truly working-class and
popular plan to respond to the most urgent problems of the poor and
hard-working nation [of Uruguay], an alternative to every bourgeois
[political] variant, whether openly neo-liberal or "national and
popular."

Translation by Yosef M.

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[*"Mercosur or Mercosul (Spanish: Mercado ComÃºn del Sur) is a regional
trade agreement between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay,
founded in 1991 by the Treaty of AsunciÃ³n." From en.wikipedia.org]